When recently retired Erie Catholic Bishop Donald W. Trautman was first announced as the new shepherd of the Erie diocese in 1990, I used this platform to write him an open letter.

My missive cited some of the usual issues at the center of dissent in the American church and urged him to be a different, more open kind of bishop. And I described myself as standing "on the fringes of my church, not fully part of it nor willing to sever my ties."

What strikes me now about that exercise is the naiveté it reflected and the hope I clung to. But I was young then, not quite 30.

Trautman wasn't the bishop I wanted him to be, of course. And it's safe to say he didn't appreciate some of the press he got.

The low point came a little more than a decade later after the Boston Globe shattered the cover-up of the systematized sexual abuse of children in that diocese, and this newspaper began digging for whatever there was to find here. The resulting bad blood endured through the rest of Trautman's tenure.

I helped launch and oversee the investigation that produced a series of reports that constitute most of what the public learned about how children in this region were victimized and their attackers shielded over decades. I'm as proud of that work as any I've been part of in my career.

But it was also dispiriting for an already struggling Catholic. I remember clearly the resistance and resentment with which our reporters' inquiries were met by the local hierarchy and how little the suffering and scars of victims seemed to figure in its responses to the scandal.

In hindsight, that and the serial revelations of crimes and cover-ups throughout the church pretty much tore it for me. I found myself increasingly uncomfortable even at the fringes.

But in tracking and periodically opining on the sexual abuse scandal and subsequent rifts in the church, I still counted myself Catholic. There was more commentary than communion, sure, but it felt like fighting the good fight over something central to my experiences and identity from my earliest memories.

I wonder now whether I've been fooling myself. As I've followed the changing of the guard in the church, first locally and now globally, I can't get past how little it feels like anything to do with me.

The pending selection of a new pope to succeed Benedict XVI, like last fall's installation of new Erie Bishop Lawrence T. Persico, triggers a professional instinct to observe and analyze more than any personal sense of spiritual or institutional possibility. That surprises and unsettles me, but it's pointless to pretend otherwise.

If I really am making my way toward the exit, one of the busiest doors in today's church, I understand that's of no consequence to less conflicted church members who would advise not letting that door hit my backside on the way out. Strictly speaking, church teachings make no provisions for cafeteria Catholics.

Still, there are a lot of us who on some issues -- the place of women in the church, for example, or the moral stature of gay people in general -- can't square our consciences with church orthodoxy or at least believe such differences should be discussed openly within the church. Some of those people are harder to write off than I am.

A new Pew Research Center poll asked American Catholics two open-ended questions: What's the most important problem facing the Catholic Church today, and what's the most important way the church helps society?

The top answer to the first, by far, was the sexual abuse scandal. The leading response to the second, also by a wide margin, was helping the poor, sick and needy.

The former brings to mind the priests who preyed under the cover of the collar and the bishops and cardinals who enabled and concealed their crimes. The latter brings to mind, to my mind at least, the nuns who take the love and mercy of the Gospels to the least of our brothers and sisters wherever they are to be found.

But Pope Benedict's Vatican labeled the good sisters of America as part of the problem because, among other things, they're too willing to entertain questions and views the hierarchy has declared to be verboten. They're too open to engaging the real lives, moral qualms and evolving understanding of people in the modern world, in other words, the way an ingenuous young columnist hoped a new bishop would 23 years ago.

I still believe the church will change in due course, and even the younger me understood such things happen in their own time. What I underestimated was the weariness that comes with the waiting.